Adios, Texas… But Not Really

04.18.09

Looks like Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants to party like it’s 1861.

Incredible how the GOP threw around the whole anti-American, unpatriotic labels at anyone who questioned Bush’s policies during his tenure yet now it’s somehow perfectly acceptable for a state governor to declare the desire to secede from the union. Can you get much less patriotic than that?

Many people have adverse opinions about Texas of late. Namely because it gave us the wonder that was 12 years of reign under a Bush. Having been to Texas numerous times now, I can say that not all Texans are stereotypical braindead hicks who love guns, hate minorities, and bleed GOP sentiment. This is a case of the few yelling loud enough that they sound like the many. They are not. At least not in relation to the entire country; apparently, 18 percent of Texans polled said they would vote in favor of secession.

Gov. Perry’s words are absurd. It shows how polarizing and removed the majority of the Republican party is from reality. The Limbaughs, the Hannitys, the Perrys, the Jindals, and all the rest need to realize how the negative smear campaign against the elected-by-a-landslide President Obama and the policies of the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress only continues to turn the tide against them, save for the vocal few. Blasting their ideas instead of presenting new, positive concepts of their own will only sink them further into the oblivion they find themselves in.

Until then, we’ll be hearing more and more of this ridiculousness. Now is a time to question with genuine interest and offer new ideas that come from reality, not ideology. It’s time to focus on what can work, not what we’d like to work in a perfect world. It’s time to come together during a crisis like both parties did after 9/11, not push the other away with blasphemes of socialism and fascism.

Perhaps instead of constantly drawing attention to the inanity of those select few, we should just ignore them. Let their stupidity go unheard and unanswered. Let them lull themselves to sleep with their own fiction while the rest of us spend our efforts actually trying to solve the problems with real world solutions. However, I worry that it would be like those eight years under Bush when so much of the media was silent despite all of the law-breaking being done by the administration.